Risk Management
by Stalks-the-Moon
Summary: Professionalism, Arcade found, was the key to compartmentalization. Warnings inside.


**It was four in the morning when I wrote this.**

 **Warnings: Boys in love, harsh language, description of injuries, description of death, detailed smut**

 **Word count: 2,665**

* * *

 **Risk Management**

Maybe Arcade was trying to achieve some unreachable dream, doing what he was doing. God, what had he even been thinking? How much could a couple under-supplied, under-supported Followers doctors do in Freeside, with the drugs and the gangs and the NCR versus Legion in their own back yard? The door to the Mormon Fort was always open to all who meant no ill will, and as a result they saw the worst of everything.

And Arcade, who was supposed to just be a researcher, found himself trying to pull more than his own weight in the infirmary tents. Most of the other doctors were thin, lanky things, and Arcade, being generally the largest and strongest among them, spent a good part of his time wrestling with the larger, wilder patients- military men, mostly, still coming down from either the high of battle or the high of drugs. Sometimes both. The Followers treated them all the same.

There were plenty of other duties that Arcade found himself attending to as well, long nights researching new (or, perhaps, old) methods of creating stimpaks the least arduous of the lot. He ran errands for the other doctors when he had a spare moment. He helped lift and move and bathe the more seriously injured patients. He helped with the rehabilitation of the healing; that was the study he had spent the most time on, physiology, and it was predictably what he was best at. He spent huge chunks of his time in the Intensive Care Unit.

Professionalism, Arcade found, was the key to compartmentalization. There was no way he could juggle all that there was to be done in a day if he got distracted by every dashing young soldier-boy that propositioned him from a cot in an infirmary tent. Arcade was a busy man, after all, and he didn't have time even for storage-room trysts. Work stayed work- the people he worked _with_ and _on_ included- and pleasure stayed pleasure. Or, at least, that was Arcade's mindset for a good couple months. For a good couple months, the line between work and play remained firm and thick and undeniable.

And then _he_ showed up.

Red hair and a broken jaw. Sun-touched skin littered with wounds and scars. Lean muscle and tough sinew and sharp bone and the worst case of malnutrition Arcade had seen in a long time. He was damn near dead when the NCR sniper with the red beret had carried him through the gated of the Mormon Fort, and it took everything Arcade had to keep him from flat-lining the first night.

The first few hours consisted of Arcade cleaning the wounds to the best of his ability, hooking up IV's and diagnosing injuries. The NCR sniper hovered at his shoulder even when he wasn't caring for his most recent patient, wordlessly procuring medical supplies from a bag that certainly didn't belong to the Followers. About the end of hour three, the NCR sniper- Craig Boone, Arcade catalogued, but didn't take too much time to think on- wandered off, leaving Arcade to administer Med-X and a super-stimpak to a patient with rapidly failing vitals while simultaneously trying to help another doctor with a cazador-poisoned Legionnaire recruit ( _The Followers treat all_ , Arcade reminded himself firmly as he pressed the anti-venom to the boy's lips).

Hour seven, with all patients stabilized and the sun rising over the horizon, Arcade dropped on his ass onto the hard-packed dirt and rested his head against his wrists: his hands were pretty damn bloody from redoing the stitches that his newest patient had torn _again_ , and he honestly didn't have the energy to clean them yet. He was tired. Yanking people from the grasp of death always took more energy than Arcade had. His newest patient would live, though. The worst of the wounds were neatly stitched, all that need it was bandaged. His broken jaw had been set, stimpak administered to accelerate the mending of the bone. His vitals were finally stable, if a bit weaker than Arcade might have liked.

"You did a good job, Doc."

Arcade jumped when Boone appeared behind him, bottle of water offered over the doctor's shoulder and praise on his lips. The doctor took the water gratefully, wincing as it washed over dried lips and a parched throat. It was then that he noticed just how long he'd been working without rest, realized just how famished and thirst and exhausted he was. He silently berated himself for taking such poor care of his body- again, because little things like eating and drinking and _sleeping_ tended to slip Arcade's mind when he started getting busy.

"I'll watch him for now," Boone said, moving to rest against the edge of the patient's cot and looking very much like a mountain lion defending its cub- or mate. "At least until the other doctor gets back. You get some food. I'll start shouting if Red takes a jump off the deep end."

Reluctantly, Arcade did leave to get something to eat. MRE's weren't exactly Arcade's favorite meal in the world, but fresh, nutritious, _squishy_ food was given first to the patients who needed it, then to the doctors and staff who wanted it. Not that Arcade admired them that day: Jared was a hell of a cook, but you can't make prickly pear fruit and molerat meat appetizing not matter how you slice it.

Arcade hurriedly finished his food and a second bottle of water before returning to the ICU, still tired but considerably more alert. Or the five patients resting there, "Red", as Boone had called him, was perhaps the most likely to survive, provided the nutrient bags hooked to the IV did their job and he woke soon enough to avoid dystrophy. One soldier with a serious head injury was on the border of life and coma. The others… Arcade didn't consider himself to be a man of God, but he did pray for them when he had a free moment.

Julie and Mattie had already taken over the ICU by the time Arcade got back. Julie chastised him for working too hard- "And right through Mattie's shift, too," she accused- before threatening to chase him out with a clipboard if he didn't go at least _try_ to get some sleep. Boone had yet to move from his place at Red's side, and the doctors very much fluttered around him as though he wasn't there as they attended to their patients, only acknowledging him when he offered them supplies.

Satisfied that his patients were in good hands, Arcade went to catch some much needed shut-eye.

In two days, Red was cleared to be moved out of the ICU. He'd woken a few times, briefly, distressed and confused, but he had quickly fallen back into his slumber. Despite the best combined efforts of the Followers doctors, Red was the only one of the five that made it out of that tent alive. The young soldier-boy had passed away peacefully in his sleep. The Legion recruit went out screaming delusions as the Cazador poison took its toll. The Farmer's wife had died of gangrene before they'd even realized it had set in. The kid with muddy eyes and dark hair had coughed and coughed and coughed until his lungs couldn't take it anymore.

Arcade had felt every one of these deaths personally. The beds, however, did not stay empty for long, and Arcade had no time to mourn them; it might have been a couple hours before the sheets were changed and new bodies filled the cots. _Mors Omnia,_ Arcade thought sadly, mopping sweat off a soldier's brow with a cool, damp towel- the fever was breaking, thank God, but the boy had a long way to go still. _Death takes all_.

Over the next week, Arcade found his time split between the infirmary tents. He hardly got a chance to eat and drink, much less work on the research waiting for him in the notes at his desk. Boone helped immensely; a strong soldier like him was more than capable of holding down addicts and moving the ill and injured, and he gave his aid readily. And maybe it was Boone's constant presence, or his own, over-taxed mind looking for some kind of reprieve, but Arcade found his thoughts wandering back to the mop of red hair sleeping peacefully in his cot.

Red was a handsome kid, Arcade realized as he checked to be certain his jaw was healing properly. Early, maybe mid-twenties, sharp but delicate features, Red had a very courier-like look about him, all lean and though and possibly ( _definitely_ ) careless. It was clear that he wasn't always a courier, though. Couriers didn't get have old scars that wrapped around their necks or crisscrossed their backs. Arcade was certain of their origin, and the thought of them almost made him sick at times.

He never talked about them, though. Never confided in other doctors, never brought them up when someone asked about that particular patient's condition. Arcade hardly even let the younger doctors tend to Red. He insisted on tending to Red himself, and, though he made all the excuses in the world, he knew he was afraid of how they might judge the boy, how they might gossip. The story of these scars was Red's. Nobody else needed to know unless Red deigned to share.

Red woke on the third day in the Follower's care to Arcade and Boone at the side of his bed. He was confused, tired, weak, but Arcade slowly brought him into the present before leaving him to Boone to coax some real food and fluids into him. Arcade didn't spend near as much time tending to Red as he might have liked; the Fort had received a sudden surge of Buffout-high NCR soldiers coming back from fighting with the fiends. By the time he had a minute to return to check on Red, the boy was already asleep again.

Sometime between the first time Arcade got to check on the sleeping Red and when the NCR soldiers had been dealt with, both Red and Boone had disappeared.

Arcade couldn't help the swell of disappointment that hit him at the sight of the empty cot. He didn't get to linger on it for long, of course, not with all the work to be done. But no matter how many times he pushed it to the back of his mind, it would come back at the most random and inconvenient times- a dip of depression, a sting of sadness, a hit of heartache that Arcade tried desperately to shut down. He was too damn old to be pining over a couple of kids!

Or, so he told himself. He never really believed it, though. Just like Julie clearly hadn't believed his half-assed excuses for why he'd gotten so down suddenly. She didn't pry, however, and Arcade didn't particularly feel like spilling his guts to her, so they went to their opposite sides of the tent and pretended that nothing was wrong.

Except that, no matter how Arcade looked at it, there was something wrong. He'd made a mistake, broken his own rules, _gotten attached_ to a kid he hadn't even gotten a chance to speak with and a sniper who'd helped him out here and there. He reminded himself that this pain as his punishment. He told himself firmly that this wouldn't happen again, that these feelings would fade. And they did, for a time.

And then Red just had to come back.

Arcade was working when Red arrived, so the boy waited- fucking waited, patient as you please, trading small-talk with the guards and other staff- until he could talk with Arcade. Red cut an impressive figure, awake and lively and _healthy_ , all blood-red hair and burning red eyes that glowed with the slightest bit of radiation stain. There were no injuries, but there were thanks and supplies in abundance- Med-X, Rad-Away, stimpacks, _fixers_. He thanked Arcade personally, clasping one of the doctor's hands in both of his, grinning like a fool.

The offer Red and Boone made was hard to resist: a chance to make things better, to help stop all this senseless violence. The cynical ( _realistic_ ) part of Arcade tried to remind him that three people in this massive wasteland probably wouldn't mean shit in the grand scheme of things. The hopeless romantic in Arcade, unfortunately, was swayed by Red's silver tongue. With the fiends defeated and the number of patients considerably lowered, it wasn't as though the Fort _really_ needed a useless researcher like Arcade, right?

Travelling the wastes turned out to not be nearly as bad as Arcade remembered it to be .He still burned ridiculously easily under the unchecked glare of the relentless Mojave sun, but it wasn't anything that Boone's spare beret and a little caution didn't solve. Red and Boone were nice enough travelling companions, even if Red didn't seem to know how to say no when someone asked a favor of him and Arcade's doctor's bag saw a _lot_ of use. Despite the danger and the annoyances ( _Fucking wildlife_ , Arcade growled, kicking at a cazador corpse. _Someone needs to burn every cazador and deathclaw nest in the fucking Mojave_ ), Arcade found it to be… exhilarating, in a way he hadn't experienced in a long time.

Arcade, to this day, has no idea how he ended up in a bed in the Lucky 38 with Red's lips on his own and Boone in his lap, mouth tracing and teasing a path up and down his neck. His thoughts were all over the place at best, and Red and Boone seemed determined to scatter his thoughts further. In hindsight, that might have been the entire reason; Red always said Arcade thought too much about everything.

The prospect of being with two men was neither a new idea nor novel experience to Arcade; he'd had some admittedly adventurous teen years, and, even if they hadn't cultivated the smoothest man in the world, they'd certainly cultivated a man with an open mind. But there was just something about these two men, the way they laved attention onto him. Red opened him up from behind with teasing fingers, taking far longer and far more care than any of Arcade's past lovers. He wanted to tell Red to _hurry up_ , that he wasn't _fragile_ , but he kept getting distracted by the ay Boone mouthed at his cock, wet and sloppy and fucking _perfect_.

The rhythm they set was torturous. They moved just slow enough, just off-beat enough, that Arcade could barely stand it. Red set the pace, fucking Arcade with steady, even thrusts. Boone, however, held Arcade on the edge. It was like he know exactly when Arcade was too close, knew exactly when to slow down, to pull away.

Arcade practically _mewled_ when Red came inside him, hot and messy, whined high in his throat when Red pulled out and Boone pulled off his cock in exactly the same moment, flat-out thrashed and cried out when Boone pushed into the mess Red had left behind in one slow, toe-curling thrust. Boone worked him fast and hard and mercilessly and Arcade clung to the sniper's back, sobbed into his shoulder because _fuck_ it was too much.

A calloused hand wrapped itself around Arcade's length, and Arcade threw his head back _screamed_. He was vaguely aware of Boone coming inside him, adding to the mess that was already trickling down his thighs, but the pleasure that swept through him made everything white and _blank_. Two sets of strong arms held him steady as he shook through his orgasm, trembling as he came down from his high. Two pairs of hands carefully cleaned him up to the best of their abilities. Two warm bodies wrapped Arcade in a blanket of safety.

When he woke in the morning, Arcade wasn't certain he'd ever been so grateful for running water.


End file.
